Ericsson unveiled four new solutions ahead of Mobile World Congress to support communication service providers in capturing the business opportunities created as the 5G era moves closer.

Fuelled by the Internet of Things, 5G and the cloud, service providers will see a growing number of diverse network uses, which will bring new value chains, financial models and business opportunities. To capture the opportunities ahead, service providers will have to continuously transform and adopt new ways to create value for consumers.

Along with this development, network performance is becoming increasingly important and an increasingly challenging task. A new study, which will be published in the MWC edition of the Ericsson Mobility Report, reveals that a poor video streaming experience can actually have a "double whammy" effect, since it not only leads to lower service provider brand equity, but actually helps competing brands to gain brand equity.

Launch 1: Mobile Broadband for Everyone

The latest Ericsson Mobility Report forecasts that 90 percent of the world's population will be covered by WCDMA/HSPA mobile broadband networks by 2021. At the same time, more than 50 percent of the world's population today still lacks internet access, especially in developing countries. This provides a great opportunity for mobile operators.

In support of the vision of making mobile Internet access available to everyone, Ericsson is addressing three different challenges: enhancing network performance, improving operations efficiency and lowering cost for mobile broadband coverage.

Ericsson's WCDMA Flow of Users doubles network performance on existing site infrastructure, Zero Touch WCDMA increases network operational efficiency by a factor of three and Mobile Broadband Expander drastically lowers TCO by up to 60 percent while simplifying deployments of all the hundreds of thousands 2G-only sites that already exist.

Mobile Broadband for Everyone will be fully available in Q2 2016.

Launch 2: Delivering Extreme App Coverage

As part of the evolution toward 5G, and to improve the performance and efficiency of today's LTE technology while meeting the network demands created by growing data traffic, Ericsson is launching new Ericsson Radio System software and hardware. The launches support the world's first commercial offering of LTE 1Gbps peak data rates, in addition to hyper-scalable radio access network architecture for Cloud RAN.

The Ericsson Radio System is also being complemented with three new radio access products supporting 4x4 MIMO, and new spectrum bands. Efficiently addressing user demands for extreme app coverage will also drive requirements for multi-gigabit capacities and multi-band solutions in the backhaul, which Ericsson is addressing with new microwave additions to the Ericsson Radio System.

Delivering Extreme App Coverage will be available beginning in Q2 2016.

Launch 3: Experience Centric Managed Services

For subscribers, network performance and user experience are increasingly important. To support operators in becoming experience-centric, Ericsson is launching the Service Operations Center (SOC) and the Experience Management Center (EMC) functions of our Experience Centric Managed Services offering.

The SOC monitors the performance of services such as video streaming and web browsing in real time, which is translated and correlated into network performance requirements. The EMC monitors consumers' experiences and perception through, for example, customer surveys, social media analytics, Net Performance Score studies and churn analysis, which is translated and correlated into service performance requirements.

Operators that have a better understanding of both service quality and their consumers' perception of their experience are better able to improve by both measures.

The new features of Experience Centric Managed Services are available immediately.

Launch 4: Revenue Manager

Revenue Manager is a convergent, real-time charging and billing product for digital service providers. It leverages a breakthrough, cloud-based highly configurable architecture to deliver new levels of automation, flexibility and operational efficiency. It is the first - business support system (BSS) designed for the opportunities and challenges of the Networked Society.

The product enables service providers to launch new products and services in days, capture new revenue streams with real-time revenue sharing and drive customer experience through personalized omni-channel interactions, embedded analytics and unified policy control.

Revenue Manager 16 will be generally available in June 2016.

The solutions will be showcased during Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2016, held 22-25February 2016 in Barcelona, Spain.